Here’s What You Get When You Project The Lorax Into a Blizzard

These Blizzard of 2013 photos aren’t your typical snapshots of cars buried in snowdrifts or hipsters building anatomically correct snowmen. With a little trial and error, photographer Brian Maffitt produced magnificent images that look like something out of a science fiction movie or a DNA lab.

To capture his unique “Projector Snow” images, which you can see in the gallery above, he pointed an old Optoma DLP projector out a bedroom window as the mighty snowstorm known as Nemo dumped 15 inches of powder on Maffitt’s hometown of Chestnut Ridge, New York, last week. Using an Apple TV, the photog pulled up the first kids’ movie he could find on Netflix and began beaming the colorful video into the night.

“The movie was The Lorax, but for no good reason,” Maffitt told Wired. “Projecting a darker movie like Saw wouldn’t have worked as well — and may have startled the neighbors.”

The projected video lit up the snow swirling in the air, and longtime shutterbug Maffitt was on his way to capturing images that blew up online, drawing hundreds of thousands of views in just a few days. (You can see high-res versions on his Flickr photostream.)

The 50-year-old photographer, who said he’s been into experimental photography since his teenage years shooting star trails at summer camp with a 35mm SLR, said it took him about an hour of swapping out lenses and tweaking camera settings and projection angles before he began producing quality shots. Eventually, the projector’s “color wheel” shutter combined with the fluttering snowflakes to produce “results that look both organic and digital,” said Maffitt, who has done video production for years and even designed video special-effects software for Adobe After Effects.

“I’ve toyed with the idea of shooting swirling snow for a while, but this was the first big snowstorm we’ve had when I was prepared to experiment,” he said. He ultimately used a 50mm f 1.4 lens mounted on a Canon EOS 7D to capture hundreds of photos and a video, which you can watch in the gallery above.

The project presented unique challenges, even for a veteran of nighttime photography.

“A huge swirling cloud of snow produces a ton of ambient light, so pointing directly at the sky was useless,” Maffitt said. “Even a quick exposure would blow out the image. I had to find a dark spot, and more importantly, point the camera at a dark object — in this case, a big pine tree outside my bedroom window.”

He set his camera to Bulb mode so he could could control the shutter completely by touch. “It became a process that felt very much like painting, where I tried to match the length of the depressed shutter with the speed and density of the snow,” he said. “Too much snow and too long an exposure would blow out the scene.”

“This is the only time I’ve captured a ‘digital’ result using purely analog means,” said Maffitt, who by day works as chief creative officer at Total Training, an educational site focused on creative use of software.

After 90 minutes with the window propped open on the 28-degree night, Maffitt ended up with cold hands — and some really hot pictures. “For the record, I was prepared to go outside to get the shot, but fortunately that proved unnecessary,” he said.